Page 45 of Caging Darling

The splitting headache at my temple is the next. Then, the craving. The aching for more.

“It’s time for Wendy Darling to wake up.”

My eyes flutter open, and I end up with Michael’s hair in my eye. I blink as furiously as possible in my nearly immobilized state.

“I’m awake, buddy.”

He grasps my cheeks, shaking my head as he stares at me, his head on the pillow next to mine. I let him shake me. I hardly have the energy to protest, but I wouldn’t, anyway. Michael’s the only person I want touching me anymore.

The door creaks, then a gasp cuts through the room. “You’re awake.”

Victor scrambles to my side, grabbing the stool next to the bed through the space between his legs and tugging it as close as he can toward me. “You need to drink something,” he says by way of greeting.

My parched throat croaks in agreement as I whisper, “I’m sorry.”

Wrinkles form between Victor’s black brows as he reaches for the jug on the bedside table and unstoppers it. “What for?”

I go to push myself up in bed, but my limbs are trembling with weakness, plus there’s the added challenge of unraveling myself from Michael. Eventually, I give up, and Victor presses the jug to my chapped lips. I sputter on the water but manage to get a few sips down.

“For not knowing how to stop.”

Victor watches me intently. “And how are you supposed to stop when he is practically shoving it down your throat?” When I meet Victor’s eyes, they’re not raging like they once did. Instead, the fire in them has gone out, replaced with something far more lethal, a bitterness that tastes of poison on the otherwise stale air.

I blink away the two heads forming from Victor’s neck, struggling to regain my hold on reality. Part of me feels as though I’m at risk of toppling into sleep again at any moment.

“He gave you too much this time,” says Victor.

Peter in the cave. Telling me it was for my own good. Forcing it into my mouth.

I feel sick, but there’s nothing in my stomach to heave. Tears sting at my eyes, the sensation so familiar now, I can’t remember what they felt like before. I try to take a steadying breath, but the air is too thin. “He’s going to keep me like this forever, isn’t he?”

I can’t bear to meet Victor’s gaze. It appears he can’t bear to answer my question.

I’munsure how much time passes like that. All I know is that I return to the familiar. The cycle of dust, sleep, and eat plays routinely enough, but I’m never sure how long I’m out for. These days, I hardly make it out of the Den, and since we’re underground, I can’t rely on the sun to inform me of the time.

For a while, I try to decipher the time by Michael.

“Wendy Darling, wake up. Wake up, Wendy Darling.” But he’s gotten to where he says it regardless of whether I’m awake or sleeping, so who knows if he understands the timing of it.

Even when I’m lucid enough to think, I find myself in a frenzied spiral, an obsession.

Tink hadn’t killed me, either time, when she could have. The time she shoved me under the waves. In the cave when I’dattacked her first. Tink hates me. That’s evident enough, but she possesses the self-control to keep me alive.

So why kill John?

My mind goes back to the night that Tink held me underneath the waves. I’d been so panicked, the adrenaline rushing through me with such ferocity, the faerie dust had left my system. She’d blown a shadow into my face and watched me as the wraiths chased me barefoot into the forest.

And then I’d stumbled over the grave of Victor’s father.

But what if that hadn’t been a coincidence? What if the shadows had led me there and Tink had known that they would?

I usually consider the first time Peter dosed me to be the night I accidentally hurt Michael. But he’d dosed me before that, hadn’t he? The one time I’d climbed up to the storehouse on the cliff. I’d heard a wraith screaming, and then Peter had appeared and placed the faerie dust on my tongue…

He’d given it to me the night we’d flown in the sky, too.

But why give me the faerie dust that night at the storehouse? Just so I wouldn’t be frightened? I suppose if he knew wraiths might taunt me to kill myself, that’s reason enough. And perhaps that was reason enough for Tink to want me to see them as well.

So I’d kill myself?

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